The Cabin in the Woods

Something punched him between the shoulder blades. He gasped and staggered forward, losing his footing and wondering what the hell the zombie could have thrown to have unbalanced him so much. And then he sprawled in the mud and leaves as the cool kiss of pain drifted in, and he knew.

Knife…

The knowledge invited the agony to settle upon him and he gasped, never understanding that such pain could exist. He felt entered and violated, the foreign object probing his innards, heavy and hot in his insides. He reached around with one hand, the movement shifting the rusted metal blade in his flesh. Crying out at last, his fingertips brushed cool metal. But he couldn’t gain purchase.

He brought that hand beneath him and reached with the other, but was no more successful.

Get up and run! he thought. Don’t fuck around here, get up and run, if you can get… up… then do it and… run!

Marty heaved himself up on both hands, screaming as his wounded flesh flexed around the piercing blade, and then he felt hands closing around his ankles. They pulled, he hit the ground face first, and then Judah started dragging him into the forest. Leaves crumpled beneath him, sticks and rocks scraped his groin and stomach and chest, filth getting into his open wounds, and he could barely find the energy to hold up his head.

“Help!” he screamed at last. But his voice was pitiful, and he tasted blood in his mouth. “No! Noooo!”

Judah dragged him, not rushing, keeping a steady pace whatever obstacles he had to overcome. A fallen branch snagged on Marty’s clothing and the zombie pulled on, eliciting a scream from Marty as a sharp stick pierced his stomach and snapped off. He gasped, crying out again, and tried to reach a hand down to explore the new wound. But though he managed to reach a hand beneath him, the dragging prevented him from feeling how serious the puncture was.

Warmth was all he felt, and wetness. More blood leaking from him to soak into this unnatural forest’s floor.

Are they watching me even now? he wondered. The death and pain’s for real, but there was still that camera, so are they watching me now? Those controllers? Those bastards?

“Help me!” he shouted. “Please!”

They passed over a small rise topped with heavily thorned plants. First he heard them snagging in Jonah’s clothing and dried skin, and then they gouged and pricked at his own-thighs, scrotum, stomach, chest, and then his face, because he was feeling weaker with each second that passed by, and couldn’t hold it up. His back was wet and hot around the knife wound, cooler elsewhere as the night air whispered across the blood. He could smell it, and see it beneath him as he left a bloody trail across the forest floor.

Marty coughed and spat a dark mass. Tears burned his eyes. The darkness grew darker. “No… help me!”

And then the darkness grew deeper still as Judah went down. At first Marty didn’t understand, but as things started to feel and sound different-the ground was damper, his cries and the dragging noises muffled by something surrounding them-he realized what was happening. Judah had risen from a hole in the forest floor, and now he was taking Marty back down into it.

He started struggling with all the energy and determination he had left, digging his fingers into the soil, clawing, trying to gain purchase as the zombie continued to pull. Trees and sky were being drawn away and total darkness hauled him down, and he’d never wanted to be out in that weird forest as much as he did then.

“Help me!” he screamed again, voice swallowed by the ground around him. He could see each extreme of the hole now as it framed the outside, and the inside smelled musty and of old decay long given over to time. His strength was leaving him. The knife drained his life and poured it into the ground around him. He smelled wet earth and blood.

One final scream and the outside was cut off from view, and Marty could do nothing but be dragged, and dragged, and dragged toward his doom.

•••

The screen grew still as the screaming boy was taken underground. They had cameras and sensors down there too, but there was no need to check on what was happening. Old Jonah Buckner was good at his craft, and if he couldn’t extract the knife from the kid’s back to finish the job, he had plenty more. Down there. In the darkness.